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Embracing social media to simplify local BMC messagingThu, 08 Mar 2018 18:11:56 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5114899399Workload Automation to Digital Business Automation: Why Digital is Criticalhttps://lobobmc.com/workload-automation-to-digital-business-automation-why-digital-is-critical/
https://lobobmc.com/workload-automation-to-digital-business-automation-why-digital-is-critical/#respondThu, 04 Jan 2018 03:49:25 +0000https://lobobmc.com/?p=2507By Anthony Lobosco – Deliveries by drones. Self-driving cars. Technology is advancing faster than we ever could have imagined. We have entered a truly “smart” age that’s filled with smarter communication, smarter homes, and ever smarter lives. In order to keep up with the fast pace of technology, Workload Automation has no choice but to evolve into Digital Business Automation.

Here are five key reasons BMC’s Workload Automation is transforming into Digital Business Automation.

1) Companies that don’t go digital by 2020 will not exist in a meaningful way in 10 years

It’s simple – if you don’t transform, you will lose your competitive advantage. That includes BMC and one of the many reasons why Workload Automation is evolving into Digital Business Automation. Your competitors are new digital natives, 100-year-old companies, or anyone in between. In Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation, the authors write: “The elements of the digital world—software, hardware, networks, and data—are pervading the business world, and they’re doing so quickly, broadly, and deeply.” Companies that are winning are the ones using technology to their competitive advantage like “breaking some of the traditional paradoxes of operational excellence, helping you to build capabilities that improve efficiency and agility, power new customer engagements, and enable new business models—all while remaining largely hidden from your competitors. ”

Companies like these have reconfigured new delivery models to create new products and services that have reinvented entire industries. They use technology to change the way they do business—their customer engagements, internal operations, and even business models. Westerman, Bonnet, and McAfee, authors of Leading Digital, put it this way: “To these companies, new technologies such as social media, mobility, and analytics are not goals to attain or signals to send their customers and investors. Companies with stronger digital capabilities are better at driving revenue with their physical assets.” If companies want to improve top line margin, they have to go digital, provide value and positive biz outcomes.

3) Transforming the customer experience is at the heart of digital transformation.

Digital technologies are changing the game of customer interactions, with new rules and possibilities that were unimaginable only a few years back. For example, Job Scheduling is still at the heart of everything we do with Control-M, but it’s now at the center of Big Data, Agile Application Delivery and Cloud.

4) Automation is here to stay and organizations should welcome it

According to a 2016 World Economic Forum survey, an estimated 1.6 million manufacturing and production jobs will be replaced globally due to automation between 2015 and 2020. If deployed correctly, AI has already been proven to boost productivity, create new employment opportunities for digital skills, and enable human talent to flourish. Food for thought, a digital workplace can improve employee focus and boost productivity by establishing new leadership targets and methods of measuring employee performance. Guaranteed your competition is either considering, executing or reaping the rewards of it.

5) Digital is about moving fast and companies have to be agile to compete at a high level

By 2019, 74% of IT Operations will have embraced SDN (software defined networking). By 2020, people will be creating and storing 1.7mb’s per second. And the speed of everything is going to increase dramatically. Studies say companies that embrace DevOps release applications 200% more frequently than companies that haven’t. Think what that means in terms of competitive advantage. We believe this is all about automating the digital biz and that is what BMC does.

The expedient mainframe talent strategy for chief information officers remains focused on retaining baby boomer staff and their institutional knowledge of COBOL, Fortran and Assembler. This approach is understandable. Over 90% of the world’s financial transactions continue to run on COBOL and 47% of mainframe technology workers are 50 years, or older, according to the 12th Annual Mainframe Research Study just released by software firm BMC.

This strategy is also flawed; analogous to navigating a car by looking in the rear view mirror.

To drive forward, CIOs must start now to rebalance the generational composition of their mainframe staff and prioritize the recruitment of Millennial and Generation Z workers over the retention of aging baby boomers. It will not be an easy task. The youth talent pool is shallow: the BMC study reports only 7% of mainframe technology workers are 30 years old or younger. Nor will it be done quickly. The mainframe’s albatross image as a “dinosaur” technology remains firmly attached. But do not be fooled. This legacy platform is far from extinct.

A recent IDC white paper props up the image of the mainframe. The report, The Business Value of the Connected Mainframe for Digital Transformation, addresses the appeal of the “connected mainframe” to operate the cost-efficient Linux operating system, run Java applications, enable customer-facing web services, support internal and external APIs and integrate mobile applications; features which could make mainframe careers more appealing to Millennials.

But significant talent pipeline challenges remain. Most notably, the absence of mainframe curriculum or four-year degree programs, at higher education institutions. Of 4,627 colleges and universities in America, only 74, or a miserly 1.5%, offer courses on mainframe technology, or enterprise computing. Marist College and Northern Illinois University are exceptions having developed comprehensive, degree-based programs in enterprise computing. Chief information officers in search of young mainframe talent should include both institutions in their campus recruiting efforts.

With colleges under pressure to teach employable skills, it is perplexing why more do not offer programs focused on enterprise computing. The market need is there. So is the compensation. Indeed.com claims “starting salaries for mainframe developers average $113,000 which is more than double the average starting salary for electrical engineers.”

International Business Machines Corp., which dominates the global market for mainframes with a 90% market share, has a vested interest in developing mainframe talent. The firm’s IBM Z Academic Initiative provides mainframe training to 1,000 academic institutions in 70 countries. A high profile component of the Z Academic Initiative is the IBM Master the Mainframe competition, now in its thirteenth year, which focuses on challenging young people to learn mainframe programming skills.

Don Resnik, a former IBM executive, recommends chief information officers sell the mainframe platform to Millennials as “extreme IT” because the mainframe is uniquely suited to securely and dependably solve the most important business–and societal–problems posed by artificial intelligence, data analytics, cyber security and blockchain.

Linking the mainframe to everyday occurrences is an approach deployed by Julie Baxter, vice president of support for CA Technologies Europe, Middle East and Africa region. She says, “once you explain to a Millennial their phones connect to a mainframe when they do their online shopping and powers most of what they do, and you talk about the skills crisis and the growing demand for talent, they generally start to pay attention.” Compuware, an enterprise software firm, addresses how Millennials perceive the mainframe in a video.

Mentorship programs designed to pair recently on-boarded Millennial mainframe workers with veteran baby boomers skilled in mainframe technology are also popular. Success here requires patience and insight. Bill Miller, president of BMC’s zSolutions division, says the company “offers a comprehensive two-year mentoring programming where we team up new recruits to work closely with seasoned mainframe technology workers.” Ashok Reddy, general manager for CA Technologies, says the firm’s mentoring program emphasizes “the connected nature of data”, an approach in sync with IDC’s “connected mainframe” concept.

Ken Harper, director and mainframe product leader at Ensono, a mainframe hybrid solutions company, opts for an artistic approach. “I liken it to how an artist can work in different mediums – watercolor, sculpture, oils,” he says. “If you are interested in and good at Java, HTML, scripting languages, Microsoft – anything like that, then you can apply those same concepts and talents to the mainframe medium.”

With only 7% of the current mainframe workforce under 30 years old, and 10,000 Americans turning age 65 every day between now and 2029, CIOs must start now to recruit younger technologists, pairing them with baby boomers to create an “Odd Couple” in the IT workforce.

Gary J. Beach is former publisher of CIO Magazine and author of “The U.S.Technology Skills Gap”. Reach him at garybeachcio@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @gbeachcio.

Rob Carter is on the short list of the finest CIOs in history anywhere. I have profiled his accomplishments in an interview published roughly one year ago. A few months ago, Carter spoke at the Forbes CIO conference with his CEO, FedEx founder Fred Smith. First, it was readily apparent how much Smith values Carter’s opinion, indicating that no strategic decisions are ever made without Carter involved. I was also particularly struck by Carter’s overview of the IT transformation that he has led. As he said then, and as he describes in greater detail in this interview with him, the systems that were at the core of FedEx’s success in recent years in becoming and maintaining its position as a logistics and data analytics leader would not be the same ones that would sustain its success. In fact, as Carter notes, the longer the organization waited to transform, the more those systems would actually impede its success.

Carter graciously agreed to dive into greater detail in describing the transformation, and what he describes as the “Four Horsemen of Dominant Design.” At the heart of this transformation would be a cloud-first strategy. Carter readily admits that this is a decade-long journey that they are roughly in the middle of, but the results so far have already proven the value of simplifying in the ways described herein.

Peter High: You have mentioned that it dawned on you a couple of years ago that the technology that helped FedEx achieve success was not the technology that would help FedEx maintain that success. What led to that insight?

Rob Carter: I started at this role in 2000, and at that time the number one thing that I wanted to do for the business was to become fast and flexible at creating business value, because the world was changing. The needs of FedEx and the expectations of our customers were changing rapidly. The complexity of the system which we had deployed – which at one time was one of our most powerful assets – was becoming a challenge to agility for our business.

The reality of the modern computing era – and with a company like ours that has deployed technology over the last 40 years – is that this is the advent of the modern computer era. 40 years isn’t a long time. We’ve deployed unbelievably strategic technology over the years, but some of them were things like 800 MHz spectrum coast to coast so we could stand up radio towers and communicate with data to our vehicles. These weren’t voice communication tools; they were data communication tools. They communicated with the first generation of handheld computers.

Well, as much of a breakthrough as that was in allowing information to flow freely back so that customers could have the ability to track their packages, it clearly became a legacy that burdened us as the modern generation of connected mobile devices began to surface. One of the first ways they surfaced was with cell networks that could communicate with industrial handhelds, not just consumer devices. So that is a window into creative and strategic deployment of technology which becomes a burden over time.

When you’ve invested in an aggressive way, as FedEx has, to further the technology brand that our company is well known for, you wind up with a lot of things that market forces find a way of providing a more general solution for; and often one that is more economical, flexible, and frankly works better than those first generations of technology.

High: What was the process of gaining buy-in, whether from Fred Smith, or your peers across the organization, or your team (who would be undertaking this work)?

Carter: There were two really important things that I brought to the attention of Fred and the broader leadership team. The first was to paint an ugly picture of what we had. I created a systems map which was a real map of all the applications and interfaces that we had. I needed that as a tool and to know what it was we were dealing with. It was such a daunting picture of complexity that I immediately showed it to Fred and to my business partners. Fred ended up naming this thing Hurricane Rob, since it looked like a big swirling hurricane. It became such a powerful tool to clarify the issue.

Mind you, that ugly picture was a powerful set of technologies that we have deployed in this business that automate virtually everything we do. Every time an airplane flies, a truck rolls, a package sorts, or a customer connects with us, it is embodied in this picture. But this picture is not sustainable. We can’t just keep layering complexity on top of complexity and expect a different result.

The fact that the picture was real, and it was kind of mind-numbing to look at was something that scared people. So, we also created another picture – which is the more important picture today – which is the systems model that we have been deploying into rolling through 2010 to where we are today. We looked at that and said, “We need to deploy a common core of technologies”.

There is an upper core (we call it the purple core) that is the customer core of all the things we do that face off to the customer. When you look at the FedEx brands – FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Office – they each have unique properties and unique networks, but customers don’t need to understand that. They want one set of automation, one customer service, one bill, one way of becoming a customer, one account number – all of those things. So the purple core is the customer core.

There is a platinum core in the middle, which is another brand element that we have – the purple “Fed” is in every one of our brands. The platinum core is the common infrastructure, common networks, common data centers, common architectural deployments, and ultimately common services – services which represented a label, a rate, a route, an address, a customer, so we began to engineer durable assets in the middle that represented the fundamentals of our business.

The bottom core is called the multi-core. It represents the uniqueness of the systems that must be present to represent each of the FedEx brands. So, for example, FedEx Express Company is the only company that is an airline; so it has airline systems embedded that are unique to it. FedEx Office is the only company that does print and copy; so it has print and copy, image management systems. This was all represented in the journey from the hurricane through a set of engineering that would bring you to this well-engineered future. And so, for the business, the important thing was to recognize where we are and recognize where we are going.

High: If I could back up just slightly. When you first created that ugly picture, at the same time you had some of the initial hypotheses about what these changes might entail, so you could have a before and after (ugly and pretty) from the outset from those initial conversations. Is that right?

Carter: We did. But there was a notion of the up and to the right path was going to be a journey. It wasn’t going to be a straight line. So it was kind of a well bracketed journey that says “we’re going to attempt to be less wrong about this journey every step of the way” We knew we didn’t have a perfect line of sight into how to do this, but we knew why we needed to do it, and we knew what it was that we needed to do. It’s just the “how” and the “who” that we have had to spend more time on figuring out how to get there.

High: Once the changes were mapped out, what was the path then? Was there a logic to why you pursued some of the changes earlier than others?

Carter: Yes. Not so long ago, everything was different. There were different operating systems, different deployment models. Looking forward to the modern era, it wasn’t just different hardware and operating systems; it was network, storage, software deployment. So I coined the phrase, the “Four Horsemen of Dominant Design.” These were servers, networks, storage, and software.

I began to think really hard about how you might start a new company today. The probability of deploying a Z Series or I Series IBM box is near zero. You would deploy into this dominant design of scale-out microprocessors. Virtually every datacenter, every new technology company you can think of, from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Zynga, to Rackspace, all have a similar deployment model into scale with big clusters of virtualized servers. And so, I made the conclusion that that was a dominant design factor.

The same thing applies to the network. When I started my career, I was actually a DECnet Administrator at one point, using DECnet to broker all the variety of networks that these computer systems used. There were so many different network protocols and things. Then moving forward to today, you find a dominant design in IT technology Internet Protocols, TCP-IP, which is now the lingua franca of computing. Nobody has to worry anymore about what language to speak on their networks. Everybody speaks TCP-IP and understands that, so there is a dominant design point, and the story goes on and on.

This was an important construct for my business partners too. I put that in some business analogs I used. The evolution of the railroads is a good example. In the US alone, I showed that there were eight different gauges of the railroad as the railroads were coming of age. Everybody was using the same language about it that they now use about computing:- “This changes everything, it’s the future, it’s what connects the world”. But it was very hard work to get to that common gauge of the railroad, which now exists, which is still, to this day, four feet, eight and a half inches. There were many different ones, they didn’t interconnect, creating issues.

A lot of reasons people thought that was the right thing to do at the time. That story was pretty compelling at the time when you say we are at a juncture in the computing revolution here where dominant design is beginning to emerge. We can make pretty big bets about how to deploy the next generation of computing and be reasonably sure that it is going to stick, that it’ll be flexible and adaptable to this cloud world that is emerging around us. Where utility computing, utility storage, utility network, and even utility software is becoming the way that things work.

High: I’m curious about the people implications of this. Obviously these significant changes meant that tasks that people had been doing for a number of years would be either fundamentally changed or even in some cases rendered irrelevant. And obviously the opposite applies, where new skills were necessary to be able to continually deliver against the new reality that you’re describing. I’m curious how you thought of your own team and changes that were necessary. How did you engage the external vendor community in some different ways as a result of some of the changes that were necessary?

Carter: We have an undying respect for people around here. It’s something that we do well. We trust that our people are flexible and capable of moving into the future with us. At the same time, we recognize that anytime you’re changing out a fleet, if you’re retiring all of your old Boeing 727s and you’re launching a bunch of 767s and 777s out there, you can’t afford to say that the 727s are useless, because you still have a lot of men and women out there flying them. That’s the same thing you have to do with the technology.

We needed and still need the people who are flying the hurricane. We didn’t want them to be disenfranchised. So, one of the things that was important for this whole story (and I didn’t just communicate this to my business partners; I communicated it to my team as well) was that I didn’t want it to be a mystery where we were going, so people could make their own choices about their career and what they wanted to do. But at the same time, I wanted to make sure that they understood that we had a lot of work to do between here and there and that there was an awful lot of need for the skill-sets that they represented. There was no wholesale transition there. While it is fairly revolutionary, we handled it like an aggressive evolution.

High: Does that mean new training programs that were necessary though, in terms of just even re-skilling people with existing staff. The methods used to make sure that they were cognizant of what the change would entail, how jobs would change. How did you think about that?

Carter: There was a lot of training available to them. There were job opportunities available to them. One of the best ways for technical people to learn is to transition to a new space, where the work is embodied. Most technologists that have been around for a while have made that transition any number of times from one language or one operating system or methodology to another.

High: How have you gauged success? You mentioned velocity as one of the key ingredients here. One of the things you were hoping to increase was business velocity, and eliminate friction in the process making for a more flexible model for IT, and for the enterprise, more generally speaking. As you think about the value you have gotten, the value you hope to continue to derive from these changes, what are some of the other factors that you’ve been thinking about?

Carter: There are several of them. One of them is something that we’re pretty fanatical about here at FedEx, and that’s the Service Quality Index, SQI. Every aspect of our business is metric based and how effectively and efficiently do we deliver this service that we are about. So we have SQI Indexes against all of the IT systems and capabilities in ways that let us measure whether or not these things are available for our customers and available for our business. One of the things we saw as we began to reduce complexity and increase modularity in these things, was that SQI numbers begin to improve significantly. As we sit here today, we’re about 21 percent ahead of our goals for this year for SQI, and those are goals that you must hit higher levels of performance every year in order to achieve them. So it’s not easy to be 21 percent ahead of SQI goals.

Cost is another big deal in everyone’s world these days. The cost-effectiveness with which we can deliver these modular industry standard kinds of technologies has been pretty remarkable. We’ve regularly lowered the cost on an absolute basis now to the business over the last few years in ways that create margin opportunity for the overall business. If the expense for IT as compared to the revenue of the corporation is a ratio that is decreasing, then that improves margins for the business. So that has been a critical thing.

Resiliency is another critical element. It is linked to SQI, but it is a bit of a different thing. How flexibly can you run these applications in multiple locations and provide better response when you’re running very unique footprints that go on and on as far as the eye can see. In big datacenters, it is hard to be resilient around business continuity, for example.

All of those are factors that we’ve tracked and that we’re paying attention to. And frankly, the hardest one of those is the one that I don’t want to act like we have solved, and that is speed for the business. The Holy Grail in enterprise IT is how to be responsive enough for the business. It is still the thing that we’re chasing. A lot of it has to do with the fact that there is momentum behind building all of these durable assets, whether they’re infrastructure assets or software assets. And we’re still coming through the era of having the complete set of assets that we need to be able to stitch together functionality and capability from the business in a horizontal fashion, much like the world does it today, with apps and things like that. You tap into services that are available instead of building big vertical applications like what the past had.

High: Where are you in the journey now? How far along are you? I’m not sure if this is a journey that is ever absolutely completed, but how close are you to some sort of stasis?

Carter: When I talk about the journey between the beginning state (the hurricane) and the future vision (which is the cores), we’ve always characterized that as a ten year journey across the decade we are currently in, so we are about half-way. But, as far as the deployment and to the infrastructure, the hardware, the networks, those are all new. So Fred can stand up confidently and say these guys have just really done a great job. He’s looking at brand new datacenters where we don’t have all this complexity embodied in these unique hardware instances. Our datacenters look like private cloud datacenters, which look like public cloud datacenters.

We’ve come a long way, and as we’re working our way up the stacks – the first three horsemen, servers, networks, and storage – are pretty well in hand. The fourth one, software, has always been the hard one. So, that takes a long time to architect, build, consume, and decommission. We call this the ABCD’s. We’ve architected and built many of these solutions, and we’re in the process of consuming them, and then decommissioning the old legacy applications. Address is a perfect and understandable example of this. The address service that we created. When we assessed the hurricane, there were 237 applications in the hurricane around the world that in one way or another managed or dealt with addresses – physical addresses of our customers – whether it was the beginning or end of a journey, whether it was an origin or destination. Well, we built a robust and durable service, SHARE, which is the enterprise address service. It is now the address service of record. It collects about 50 million events per day from all over the world from all of our field personnel, customers, and team members out there. It essentially validates what is an address, what views of that address can you have; sometimes it’s the receiving customer, sometimes it’s a shipping customer. The address service is now in the consume and decommission part of the journey where many of the 200+ applications that existed have gone away, and the business is now consuming its address needs from SHARE. Therefore, we’ve been able to decommission the old applications that were doing that. That story is having to repeat itself across virtually every business dimension we’ve got.

High: As you think about the vendors that you engage… Is one of the keys to limit that number? To try to get that down to a more manageable group of external resources that you’re engaging, or is there one philosophical point that can encapsulate the way in which you’ve thought about engaging external partners?

Carter: One of the things that we have that makes us a little bit unique, is that almost all of our software is custom software. For example, there was nobody out there creating ERP’s to track packages when we started. So we were dealing with thousands of custom built applications, because there was never anyone around to have these things built for you. To a large extent, there’s still not. That’s not to say that we don’t have key suppliers out there. We obviously do, but increasingly that’s becoming an open stack set of solutions that use industry common hardware and industry standard layered products up and down. That’s how you become a good cloud citizen.

One of the beliefs that I have, in what will ultimately be a hybrid cloud instance, is that in order to be a good cloud citizen, you have to look pretty similar inside in your own private cloud as you would look like when you’re outside in the public cloud. What makes hybrid effective is when it doesn’t have this significant mismatch between trying to tap into broadly available resources that are represented by public cloud services, whether they’re hardware, software, storage, or network, and then what you do inside your own four walls. So as we moved all of our applications to these highly virtualized big arrays, we didn’t just do a physical to virtual conversion, which is pretty easy to do. We moved all that software through a factory, moving it to architectural minimums that changed the way that software worked and allowed it to be highly leverageable and movable around these cloud infrastructures that exist. That’s kind of how that story has played out.